“Mom?” I say.
She covers my hand with her other hand so that her hand is creating a hand sandwich. Ha, I think. A hand sandwich. Cheeky. But really I just feel her wedding ring, cold and sharp.
“Mm-hmm?” she says.
She says it sort of distractedly, which is strange, because I’m so sick and could be dying and maybe just this once she could not think about work or what’s for dinner, or if Zoe is having sex with Tim. I know she thinks about that, because I hear her talking to my dad about it when they think we’re asleep. I don’t think they are having sex, but what I do know now is that I will never have sex. There has been no one I have wanted to have sex with yet, minus Michael L, but I’m not really thinking about it because all I can hope for is a kiss, just one day, a surprise. But we can’t go anywhere from here. This is nowhere.
“Am I going to die?”
My mother looks up, startled. “My goodness, no,” she says. She brings the hand sandwich to her heart. “No, no, no. We just have to figure out what’s going on. And then they can fix it. Dying? No.” She shakes her head vigorously. “And because you are going to live, we really have to get you out of bed. You need to move around!”
The idea terrifies me. I cannot possibly move around. Perhaps ever again.
My mother clears her throat as she looks away from me, and I believe her, but I can tell my question has upset her. That’s when another doctor comes in. This one crosses his arms, and without looking at me, he says that we need to put in a central line.
“A who?” my mother asks. “What?”
He nods. “It’s a tube that is connected to a vein, so blood can be taken and we can get medications in more easily without jiggering the IVs and infecting the sites.”
I shiver. It’s not just an expression; I really do it.
As if he’s read my mind, the doctor turns toward me. He has pens in his breast pockets. Both of them. “It’s a small surgery,” he says. “Tiny, really. It will deliver all the medicines and saline and liquid food, and it will let us take blood for testing. So we can figure out the problem.”
I wonder, if I could see inside myself, what would it look like? I imagine a map, roads of sick blood leading nowhere. Blue blood. So blue inside. What I would do now to just feel my old weird self in there.
“Now, Mrs. Stoller, can you please wait outside while we put in the line?”
“I would like to stay,” she says.
He shakes his head. “Please,” he says. “It won’t take long.”
She gets up slowly, and as she walks out, I doubt I have ever been so sad to watch my mother leave the room. She leaves the door slightly ajar, but I can’t see her.
“I’ve got one too,” Thelma says over the curtain. “There are worse things. Believe me.”
A nurse comes in with a kit of some kind that she opens, peeling back the seal, and then she is scrubbing my chest with this brown antiseptic.
“I’m Alexis.” She tilts her head to the side as she spreads out large pieces of gauze over my heart.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
This is when I think of the frogs.
Okay, the frogs. Let me back up to the science lab at school. Middle school, dissecting frogs. There was a lot of human drama about the frogs. Most of the guys were super excited about the prospect of cutting into frogs; a little too excited, if you asked me. And most of the girls pretended to be squeamish, groaning when Mr. Hallibrand told us about it. But we weren’t squeamish, most of us. It’s just what we thought we should be.
A few days before we were set for the dissection, Zoe had told me that when she and her lab partners cut their frog open, it moved. “It totally came to life!” she said before kicking me out of her room for the night so she could call Tim. “I’m not kidding.”
I knew she was just trying to freak me out, but it did make me even more worried, not so much that the frog would become a zombie, but that it wasn’t really dead and that it had a soul and that soul was being tortured.
Of the four in our group, I was the one with the scalpel. I remember pinning the frog to the waxed tray. And slicing into the skin and then pulling it back from the fat tissue and muscle and bone. The anatomy of an innocent frog, exposed. My hands shook. I remember the scissors cutting, the small bones breaking when I hit something wrong. And I remember the heart. Actually, my sister wasn’t lying: when we touched it with our gloved fingers, that heart jumped back, still beating. All four of us screamed.
Now the surgeon’s head is turned at my chest. The nurse rubs on some anesthesia—“local,” she calls it, as if she means it’s like, made in America—and then he’s performing his incision. I can hear it but I can’t feel it.
Outside I hear my mother squeal. “Look at you!” she says. “How sweet you brought your dog.”
“He’s a therapy dog,” the boy, that boy, says. “I bring him to cheer up the patients. There aren’t so many teenagers on this ward, so it’s nice to have your daughter here! I came by earlier, but she was busy.”
“Busy? Huh. Well, it’s nice that you do this,” my mother says.
I remember: the frog heart jumped in my hands. It makes me think now: What does it do when you’re alive? Does it jump? The heart, I mean. My heart, I mean.
“At first it was something I had to do, but now I like to come. Sometimes I even get here before school. Originally it was pretty much my parents’ idea,” the boy says to my mom. I wonder if he’s brushing his hair out of his face with his fingertips. I wonder what it would be like to touch his hair, and I think it would feel warm, like he’d been walking through a meadow, in the sun. “I enjoy it now, though. A lot.”
“I see,” my mother says. “I’m Daphne.” My mother always has to pretend she’s this cool mother, insisting my friends call her by her first name, letting me drink wine on special occasions, taking me to R-rated movies because my dad hates going to the movies and my mom hates going to the movies alone. “My daughter is Lizzie.”
“Connor,” the boy says. “And this”—and I hear his sneakers squeak as he surely squats down; also I know he’s rubbing the dog’s scruff, and it makes me ache for Mabel—“this is Verlaine.”
“Verlaine,” I hear my mother say. “The poet!”
“Yes!” Conner says. “But also the singer. From the band Television? Anyway, his name is Verlaine.”
“I think that’s a better option,” my mother says. “The poet Verlaine was a pretty intense fellow!” She laughs.
My heart beats so hard I wonder if the surgeon can feel it. And then I wonder if it’s going to make him slip and puncture it so that it can’t ever beat again. Who, I wonder, would come to my funeral? I imagine Nana trying to give a eulogy, breaking down and being led away.
But no. Soon the surgeon gets done puffing into his blue mask, and the nurse pulls back the blue sheets and goes for my mother.
“Bye, Verlaine,” my mother coos. “Come and visit us again soon!” And then she is through my door and her face changes for a moment. When she recovers, she throws me a beaming smile. “Well, that’s a sweet pair,” she says. I know she is talking about Connor and Verlaine, but I look at the surgeon, who waits impatiently to speak with her, and wonder if she means us. Me and Mr. Surgeon sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. . . .
I’m really a frog. Frog-like. Waiting to be dissected. So there you go! Hi! My name is Lizzie Stoller. I’m sixteen years old. I’ve never been to Spain. Before this, I was normal outside, weird on the inside. Before this I was the kamikaze. I would have liked to become a vet. Welcome to my froggy world.
Day 5: Apparently Life Goes On
Zoe has talked to Lydia, and so now I know she’s starting varsity. It’s a no-brainer, really. No one’s faster than Lydia. At first it bugs me—it was supposed to be my turn—but what difference does it really make? I can’t even move.
My mother, however, doesn’t seem to realize I can’t move, and she constantly tries to get me out of bed. I’m surprised she doesn’t ge
t me airlifted. She brings me my father’s scratched-up iPad, and instead of walking, I turn to what my mother has chosen to let me watch. But she did a pretty nice job. Teen Wolf, Glee (eh, it got pretty bad after the third season), Pretty Little Liars, which I linger on, but then I hit Vampire Diaries. Why? Because I like vampires, but I think I like them in general because being one is pretty far away from my life. Vampires have nothing to do with me, and I’m comforted by not having to think about anything real. So I settle back, and then the worst thing happens. I can’t set the iPad on my belly. I can’t sit up to watch it. And for the brief moment that I do this anyway, looking at the screen makes me sick to my stomach.
So. I have no cell phone, no Wi-Fi, no movies or decent TV, and I have a mother who won’t stop harassing me to get up and walk around. And I have something horrible happening to me that no one can yet name. They have me on medicines, steroids, and some things I don’t even know about. And now I have no iPad.
That’s pretty much all there is to say about Day Five.
Day 6: And On . . .
Pretty much the same as Day Five, but add more kinds of medication that do nothing, and also add on my father trying to get me up too. And add one or two of the nurses. I wonder about the boy, about Connor, if he’s going to ever come back or if I officially scared him away. I listen for him; I can’t help it. It gives me a thing to do in here, in between my mother’s chirpiness, the calls from Zoe, the calls from Dee-Dee and Lydia, who phone me together after school. Dee-Dee is going out for Rizzo in Grease. When I talk to my friends from school, there are a lot of sighs and silences. I sort of hate talking to them.
I get a package from David B. I open it up and there’s a God’s eye, the yarn this deep, deep purple and then an intense red, wound around and around real, bumpy sticks, not the Popsicle sticks the youngest campers use. Maybe I’m softening up in here—a lot—but it feels soulful. My heart catches in my throat when I see it and then the note: I know everyone laughs at these, but I see them as talismans. They are like the sun. And the sun protects us in all these ways. I am wishing all the best for you, Lizzie! he wrote.
I think that note is beautiful.
Now I have the talisman hanging by my bed. My mother hung it with a pushpin, one she found on the nurses’ bulletin board out front.
And in between all that, Day Six is pretty much just waiting.
Day 7: The Wig; the Mountain
I wake up to Thelma’s voice, but all I want is to put my earbuds in and just tune out.
But I don’t. Yes, I say, high school. One sister. And a dog. No, I say, I don’t go to church. Virginia, I tell her. Suburbs. That’s all she asks.
Then it’s my turn. I learn this: Thelma’s married with a kid, and she’s a secretary at some government office. I’ve seen her husband—or at least the tall man in a navy-blue jacket, gold cuffs, and collar who comes in each night who I think is her husband—but I gotta say, there are too many people in and out of here, and I haven’t been paying a lot of attention.
When I tell her I’m in high school, she’s silent for a moment.
“You’ll be out soon,” she says. “This is just some strange hiccup in God’s plan.”
“You too,” I say, because what am I supposed to say? All of this is way out of the age-appropriate province.
I crane my neck and look in where the curtain is just slightly parted. I guess that’s Thelma. She’s smiling. Her hair doesn’t smile with her, and she scratches under it.
Thelma has a wig.
“Both of us,” I say, looking away.
“All right!” My mother stomps into the room with her coffee as if she’s ready to spearhead some kind of movement. “That’s it. You have to get out of that bed. You’re going to get bedsores, Lizzie! Your muscles are going to turn to jelly.”
I can tell she has talked to my father about this and that he’s said, You’re absolutely right, Daphne, you have to go in there and just make her get up. Be tough!
“I was just sitting,” I say. “That counts.” I roll away from her, onto my side, which causes a lot of pain in my stomach. It also tugs the wires that connect me to the IVs along the metal stand next to my bed, which feels like the lines are pulling at my heart.
Thelma makes a moaning sound from behind the curtain.
“Shall I call a nurse?” my mother calls out, but there’s no answer.
Just then I hear the quiet swing of the door opening, the rush of outside activity, like the sound of a seashell to my ear.
The door opens—for a fleeting second I think it could be the boy and his dog, and then the door closes and it goes quiet, as if someone has put the seashell down. It’s Thelma’s husband who comes in, with a kid I assume is their kid. They have to pass through my space to get to Thelma’s side of the room, and we all say hello and I see the little girl, her hair all frizzy with yellow and pink and purple barrettes and little ponytails all over her head. She won’t look at me.
“Poor woman,” my mother says, sitting down next to my bed.
“They’re right there, Mom,” I scream-whisper. “They can hear you.”
“Well,” my mother says.
The little girl peers around the dividing curtain. My mother doesn’t seem to notice, but I wave and try to smile, and she shoots back behind her curtain. Thelma, her husband says. Thelma Thelma Thelma, and I wonder if she has her wig off, and what her daughter thinks to see her mother like that.
“I’m not moving,” I say to my mother. “Really, I’m not.”
I think of a cheesy television movie, the one with the determined patient who gets out of bed and struggles for life, and despite the odds, and due to all that strength, he wins. But can I just say something about strength? It’s only an expression. You either become healthy again or you don’t. Just because a person is sick and isn’t dead yet, it doesn’t mean she’s strong. I don’t feel strong. In fact I’d be happy—if that’s what you want to call it—to just give up and lie here. I am the opposite of strong.
“Yes, really,” she says. “Darling, there are some very sick people here.” She tips her head toward Thelma’s side of the room.
I get it! I want to scream. But I can’t.
My mother looks up at me. She tilts her head, and I can tell she has a decision to make about which way to be: the stern, tough-love kind of mom, like on the Lifetime movies where the mom grips her daughter’s face with one hand and says, “Now you listen to me, missy, we’re going to kick this thing and we’re going to do it together,” or the sweet, tender kind of mom who takes her daughter’s hand and tells her she’s so sorry for what’s happening to her, to them, to their family, it isn’t fair, life just isn’t fair, is it? But how else could she help her?
I won’t deny I’m really hoping for the second option, when my mother says, “You are going to get up and walk those hallways and get that system moving, or we’re likely to be in here forever.”
I’m outraged. Hello? Maybe it’s not option two, but I am suffering here. I don’t know how to say that to my mother, though. How the suffering can take my breath away.
“Time to say good-bye,” I hear Thelma’s guy say as my mother sighs back into the chair.
“We?” I say.
“I know you’re the patient,” my mother says, softening. “But if you think this is fun for me, you’ve gone crazy.”
At some point it just seems easier to actually walk than to listen to people constantly asking me to walk. Also, I secretly think about the possibility of seeing Connor out there in the hall and that maybe I was rude to him and now he’s never coming back to the room. I think about changing out of my disgusting hospital gowns, but you are supposed to wear them in here, and also? It will take so much energy I won’t be able to take the walk anyway.
So. I call the nurse to say I’m going to get up. You’d think I’d told her I’d found a suitcase full of her money, because she sprints in, her face filled with gratitude as she unhooks all my wires. When I swing my feet
over the bed, my mother gets so excited it’s embarrassing. As I try to catch my breath, just from sitting, I look at these two skinny white legs coming out of my hospital robe, and they look like they belong to an old person. I have always wanted to be skinny like you just can’t be bothered to eat, like you’re not trying, but I didn’t want it to happen like this. I’m also nauseous. How many ways can I tell you how nauseated and in pain I am? There are no more words. All the words sound the same.
I just want to lie down and cry now. I can’t do this. I have never before—not even as I went screaming from the goal line, hockey stick high in the air—wanted to feel strong. I think I actually wanted to be less strong then. Just regular. Smaller, weaker, girl-like, Birdy-like. Birdy. But that’s not what I’ve become either.
I stand and grab the IV stand for balance, and holding on to my mother, I sort of stagger toward the door. I don’t even care if my hospital gown is open in back, which I guess it is, because my mother reaches behind me and closes it.
“There you go,” she says. “Look at you!”
I have all this rage. At my mother for making me do this, for talking to me this way; at my father for his stuffed animals; and also at myself, for being someone who might never be normal again, not inside or outside. Why can’t they figure out what’s wrong with me? Who do I get to freak out on for being sick like this?
I ignore my mother’s excitement as she opens the door to the hallway. The nurses are bustling around at their station outside my door. An elderly man glides by, holding his IV stand; an old guy is slumped over in a wheelchair. It’s like a television show about a hospital. Or a show about a bus station.
I push through. I’m out! I’m up! I stand, breathing in the air as if I’ve finally reached the tippy top of a mountain. I even smile at the nurse coming out from behind the station. And then I see Connor and Verlaine turning the corner from the elevator banks, fresh and ready for their daily visit. Maybe they’re coming for me! For me.
We Were Never Here Page 3
